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This paper reports results of analyses made at an all-female Gulf Arab university measuring the nature and extent of biases in students' evaluation of faculty. Comparisons are made with research reporting the nature of similar relationships in North America. Two issues are investigated: 1) What variables (if any) bias faculty evaluation results at an all-female Arab university? 2) Are biasing variables different in nature or magnitude to those reported at North America universities? Using the population of 13,300 faculty evaluation records collected over two school years at Zayed University, correlations of faculty evaluation results to nine potentially biasing factors are made. Results show biases to faculty evaluation results do exist. However, biases are small, and strikingly similar in nature to those reported at North American universities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore power-resistance plays, or organisational change (OC) politics, from a discourse theory perspective to deepen our understanding of the political and emotional dimensions of these phenomena.

The paper deploys Laclauian concepts of hegemony, fantasmatic narrative and empty signifiers alongside a recently-developed logics of critical explanation approach in the case study of an English local authority formulating a project of integrated commissioning in response to austerity.

The paper demonstrates how OC politics are played out in multiple ways, from social and political negotiations over the meaning of commissioning to the refuelling of the authority’s fantasmatic narrative.

The paper’s key value is to illustrate how and why discourse theory can contribute, alongside other discursive frameworks, to the in-depth qualitative and political study of organisational issues such as change.

The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to explore if and how management ideals are gendered within the context of Swedish higher education management and second, to investigate if and how the gendered character of these ideals has been challenged by new managerialism.

The paper draws on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 women in senior academic management positions (Vice Chancellors, Pro Vice Chancellors, Deans and Pro deans) in ten Swedish higher education institutions. Discourse analysis is used to explore the constructions of the management ideal in the interviews.

The paper identifies how the interviewed women managers constructed two different management ideals: one old-fashioned and traditional masculine ideal that was superseded by a feminine ideal that they identified themselves with. The masculine ideal was presented as being replaced by the feminine ideal due to the restructuring of higher education and the reforms in line with new managerialism. However, the feminine ideal was also associated with a number of professional challenges.

The research study is limited to management in the higher education sector, but the results have general implications as it adds richness to our understanding of the gendered effects of new managerialism. However, the paper builds on a small qualitative study with women only interviews. The paper is therefore to be considered as explorative. More research is needed, especially including men.

This chapter addresses growing concerns that, despite being a radically intentioned community, Critical Management Studies (CMS) lacks an orientation to achieve pragmatic change. In response I argue that the failure to address the continuing marginalisation of the subaltern is key to CMS being negatively represented as an elitist self-preoccupied endeavour. This state of affairs is linked to a legacy of the ‘postmodern’ turn, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, as evidenced by the nature of contemporary debates continuing to reflect the stylistic fetishes of that time. I contend that the ghost of postmodernism is evident in the continuing predilection to produce signification discourses marked by symbolic absences, which politically confine such texts to the level of epistemology. The lack of integration of ontological concerns means that corporeal aspects of daily life are neglected, resulting in an abstracted ‘subjectless’ mode of representation. To address these limitations, a feminist activist version of post-structuralism (PSF) of the time is revisited, which through its distinctive attention to community concerns, enabled the linking of epistemological and ontological representations; thereby facilitating the creation of a framework for pragmatic change. As the chapter demonstrates, by drawing attention to the integral relationship between the modes of representation, power relations and subsequent social effects, poststructuralist feminists were able to achieve praxis outcomes. Accordingly, I argue this treasure house of ideas needs to be reclaimed and provides illustrations of the design principles proffered to support my contentions.